Or will brands find ways of portraying immune health as a relevant concern long-term? Leading wellness brands share their strategies going forward.

Is a decline in immune health supplement sales inevitable?

Compared to other mature markets such as Europe and the United States, APAC is a growing market for micronutrient consumption and production.

What makes Asia-Pacific one of the leading markets for micronutrients?

Jennifer Grebow is the editor-in-chief of 

, an award-winning media-content provider in the dietary supplement and natural products market. 

, an MJH Life Sciences brand, provides insights and industry updates critical to manufacturers of dietary supplements, healthy foods, and nutritious beverages. 

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Nuun's new Sport Hydration Electrolyte Powder Drink Mix. Photo from Nuun.

 the Nuun hydration-products brand. Founded in 2014, Nuun is known for its just-add-to-water electrolyte effervescent tablets that help keep consumers hydrated. At March’s Natural Products Expo West trade show in Anaheim, CA, the brand rolled out its newest offering, for the first time branching out into a mix-in powder for its flagship Nuun Sport Hydration product.

Anthony Iannello, Nuun’s director of brand marketing, explained why the company decided to introduce its first mix-in powder. The mix-in powder, he said, is even more portable than the effervescent tablets. Whereas the tablets come in a tube of 10 tablets—already very portable—the mix-in powder is even more convenient in stick packs that let customers carry around single servings at a time. Product-wise, another difference is that the tablets are effervescent, providing a carbonated experience, while the mix-in powder is not.

There’s another way the mix-in powder stands out. “The powders are actually being categorized as a food versus a supplement, which allows the brand to make some stronger claims around hydration as a food supplement,” Iannello said. The company calls the powder an “electrolyte drink mix” instead of, say, an “electrolyte supplement.” It's positioned as a food much in the way that other sports powders are positioned as food.

Vishal Patel, Nuun’s director of product development, explained why the company is heading in this direction. “By classifying it as a food, we can make more compliant claims around it being a drink mix—that it’s for hydration, that it’s for water,” he said. This communicates to the consumer that a hydration product like Nuun is more than just a supplement.

“With supplements—technically, you don’t need to take supplements, right?” Patel said. “They’re meant to supplement your diet. When you add the word 

in my opinion, people think they don’t need it. It’s like, ‘Okay, I can supplement this, but maybe I’m already getting enough electrolytes in XYZ.’…But with food, you need food to live. You need hydration to live. So when you have products that fit in that category, it’s not an added supplement; it should be more regularly in your food intake…The proper positioning for the product should be a food because hydration is a necessity.”

By portraying hydration as a daily requirement and not just a supplemental concern, Nuun is expanding its audience to all people, not just sports enthusiasts. “Our positioning is around proactive hydration and trying to make hydration a daily need state,” Iannello said. “Being a food plays more into that—that this is a need, not a supplement to your lifestyle. Hydration is an everyday need.”

This message is the basis of Nuun’s new “But First, Nuun” consumer marketing campaign, which the company is now rolling out. “What Nuun is trying to do is educate consumers on the benefits of proactive hydration, on not waiting until you’re at a point where you need to replenish, recover, or rehydrate,” Iannello explained.

This is a departure from how hydration products have been marketed. Typically, he said, “the hydration category has been positioned as either being 1) seasonal, as in it’s only needed when it’s really hot out; 2) occasional, as in I only need it after I exercise to replenish; or 3) reactive, as electrolytes for post-exercise. It’s been about replenishing, recovering.”

“What we really want to preach,” he continued, “is that daily, proactive hydration is really how consumers should view that need state.”

With more consumers paying attention to health and wellness nowadays, now is an opportune time to spread that message. “It’s interesting,” Iannello said, “Hydration has really come to the forefront recently with consumers as being the number-one health and wellness strategy for 2023…I think there [are reports] that 75% of Americans are chronically dehydrated, and I think if you surveyed 10 folks, you’d probably hear 7 or 8 of them say, ‘Yeah, I have headaches,’ or ‘I’m groggy because I’m not hydrating enough.’”

The hydration category itself has changed over the years. Whereas hydration used to just mean “sports drinks,” today, Iannello said, Nuun sees the category more as “functional hydration.”

“Now you’ve got this functional-hydration segment, which includes Nuun, and it’s grown exponentially. It straddles more than one aisle of the store. Retailers are still trying to find the right place to sell it,” he said. “And it’s exciting.”

Promoting the benefits of functional hydration will benefit the entire market, Iannello said. “I look at it as a rising tide lifts all ships. As awareness of functional hydration grows, it’s only going to benefit a brand like Nuun…That’s partly why we are so excited about this ‘But First, Nuun’ campaign and this core insight of proactive hydration, because we feel that a lot of the competitors really talk about hydration as 

 And this is an opportunity for Nuun to occupy a white space and really help consumers reshape how they perceive hydration as a daily need state, as a daily habit.”

Another way Nuun changed the market, he said, was by separating the concept of electrolyte replacement and carbohydrates, opening the door to hydration beverages without a lot of extra sugar.

“Historically,” Iannello explained, “the sports drinks category was very much built on an optimal formula that includes carbohydrates in addition to the electrolytes.”

Patel added, “When you look at sports drinks—the traditional ones like Gatorade, etc., in the 1960s—when they wanted to create a sports drink, they wanted to do two things. One, they know that electrolytes help with hydration, almost solely replenishing what you lose in your sweat and help with the absorption of fluid. Second, sugar and carbs help with energy. Gatorade was developed for football players who need a higher amount of carbohydrates because it’s a really high-intensity sport. So they essentially just combined those two. They said, ‘Let’s just put energy 

But an effective electrolyte product doesn’t need enormous amounts of sugar; it just needs a small amount of carbohydrate to activate the electrolytes’ absorption and render them useful in the body.

Glucose does aid absorption, Patel said. “Yes, the glucose will help,” he explained. “Water and electrolytes will absorb passively. There are two types of absorption—active, when you need something to speed it up, and passive, like when we drink water it’s going to absorb. It’s going to take time, because depending on your hydration status, it may have to pull electrolytes or even glucose from your small intestine to absorb it. We know that, in the absence of sugar, it’s going to absorb, but when you add a little bit of sugar—we feel like it’s the 1 g we’ve done a lot of research on—it activates a mechanism where it turns from passive absorption to active absorption…So when you combine that glucose with that sodium molecule, it just speeds things up.” Absent the presence of glucose, he said, the body will still absorb electrolytes, just more slowly, and your body may feel somewhat bloated, which is “just your body telling you that it needs something to pull the water into circulation,” he said.

But, again, that doesn’t mean consumers 

a super high amount of carbohydrates in their electrolyte products. Over the past 10 years, Nuun has done clinical research to identify what it believes is the most effective ratio of electrolytes and sugar. Its products are formulated with just 1 g of sugar, which it believes is all that’s needed to aid electrolyte absorption.

It’s also allowed Nuun to set itself apart from other higher-sugar hydration products on the market. The brand touts its products as containing 90% less sugar than “the leading electrolyte drink mix.” Less sugar also benefits consumers who may experience gastrointestinal issues when drinking overly-sugared products, Patel added.

Essentially, he said, by giving consumers the option of a product that focuses mainly on electrolytes and not carbohydrates, it gives them flexibility to take Nuun for electrolytes and then to consume carbohydrates in other ways. For instance, Patel said, consumers could eat a nutrition bar or a banana to boost carbohydrates. “And then leave Nuun to just the hydration,” he said.

Articles

Nuun is launching a new mainstream ad campaign to communicate to consumers why daily, proactive hydration is critical.

Nestlé’s Nuun brand explains why its new hydration product shouldn’t be considered a supplement but rather a daily necessity like food: Natural Products Expo West report

In the U.S., organic wheat is the largest organic grain/seed crop with 451 million acres, followed by organic corn with 319,953 acres (based on data from 2019).

https://www.agmrc.org/commodities-products/grains-oilseeds/corn-grain

Fun fact! In the U.S., organic wheat is the largest organic grain/seed crop with 451 million acres, followed by organic corn with 319,953 acres.

Organic grain

 titled “Protections For People With An Eating Disorder” has been 

 to remove restrictions to the sale of dietary supplements marketed for weight management. Industry trade groups and stakeholders such as the Natural Products Association (NPA; Washington, D.C.) and Natural Grocers have been actively lobbying lawmakers in Colorado to protect consumer access to dietary supplements. Similar bills targeting dietary supplements have been recently vetoed by governors in the states of 

“This is a big victory for consumer access in Colorado and we want to thank Majority Leader Moreno for his leadership and willingness to collaborate on a good solution. We wish more state lawmakers in other capitals would exercise the same approach to science, reason, and common sense,” said Kyle Turk, director of government affairs for the Natural Products Association (NPA; Washington, D.C.). “Far too often, legislators simply ignore science, data and the consequences of poorly-designed legislation that ends up hurting consumers, but this was not one of those instances. Our team immediately had the opportunity to share the impact language in the bill would have on consumers and industry stakeholders. We are grateful to the Majority leader and other stakeholders in the eating disorder community who considered the facts and recognized that there is no data point connecting eating disorders and the use of dietary supplements.”

A Colorado Senate Bill (SB 23-176) titled “Protections For People With An Eating Disorder” has been amended to remove restrictions to the sale of dietary supplements marketed for weight management.

Colorado bill for protection of people with eating disorders amended to remove restrictions to dietary supplements

Pharmako Biotechnologies (N.S.W., Australia), a delivery systems innovator focused on solutions for lipophilic ingredients, talked about its new PlexoZome liposomal technology at March’s Natural Products Expo West trade show in Anaheim, CA. PlexoZome is Pharmako’s fourth innovative delivery platform to enter the market. It joins the company’s AquaCelle micellar delivery system, its LipiSperse powder-dispersion technology, and its compressible powdered oil technology. These technologies render difficult-to-disperse and difficult-to-absorb ingredients easier to formulate with and more bioavailable.

At Expo West, Pharmako’s cofounder and commercial director, Eric Meppem, said, “The beauty with the PlexoZome technology, which is the trade name for our liposomal tech, is that we can apply it to both hydrophilic and lipophilic actives.” This is a new step for the company, whose previous technologies were mostly designed to help with lipophilic ingredients like carotenoids, polyphenols, omega-3s, and CoQ10.

Meppem explained that liposomes are bi-layered structures with an aqueous core and a liquid-filled ring that allow the combination of both hydrophilic and lipophilic substances.

Liposomal technology has become quite trendy in the nutrition space today, Meppem said. However, he alleged, “most people have been looking at liposomes, but they haven’t necessarily done a lot of work with some of the science to support them.”

What does that mean for health and wellness companies? It means that if they’re buying a liposomal ingredient from a supplier with assurances that it is a true liposome—but it really 

a liposome—the buyer is getting fleeced.

In fact, Meppem said, liposomes are complicated to work with. Not everyone can create nor validate a true liposome. “Liposomes are quite technical,” he said. “Liposomes don’t occur naturally. It’s not like you mix something up and form an emulsion; you actually have to create them. They don’t occur spontaneously. They don’t happen by themselves. It’s a pharma tech that’s been translated across to nutraceuticals.”

First off, he said, a manufacturer needs to have the right knowledge to produce liposomes. “Liposomes are really small,” Meppem said. “ We’re talking a thousandth the size of a piece of human hair. So, really tiny. They’re a nanostructured vesicle. To get something that tiny, you need to have the right equipment and the right process—and, obviously, the right ingredients.”

Unfortunately, not all companies have the required expertise. Some of those companies are now coming to light. “There’s people in the market—in America, in Australia, in New Zealand, in the UK,” Meppem said. “In the UK, a couple of brands have famously been told to either take them off the market or stop calling them liposomes by the fair-trade commissioner over there. So there have been cases around the world now, and we know just from what we’ve seen on shelf and what’s at market that there are some proper liposomes, and there are some which are definitely not liposomes.”

One way to tell if a liposome is actually a liposome is to conduct testing, he said. “There’s a couple of ways to validate them,” he said. The first is to examine their size to ensure they are nanoparticles and not just microparticles. Secondly, he said, you need to measure the structure’s “zeta potential” (liposomes are negatively charged). Then, you can even use a transmission electron microscope and employ other tools, like a cryochamber, to examine the structure further and ensure it’s actually a bi-layered structure.

Doing such inspections has enabled his company to catch non-liposomes on the market. “When we looked at one of the competitors, it looked, from a particle analysis and from zeta potential, that they almost formed liposomes, but under the transmission electron microscope, it was like a stringy structure. So they’d almost formed liposomes, but they were almost more like a microemulsion or a nanoemulsion,” Meppem said. “When we looked at PlexoZome from Pharmako, they were discreet little circles.”

To demonstrate that PlexoZome is truly liposomal technology, Meppem said Pharmako has just started working with two different universities on mechanistic and pharmacokinetic studies to demonstrate absorption both orally and topically. Meanwhile, for those companies working with a liposomal supplier, he advised asking the manufacturer how they are validating that its products are truly liposomes.

The company explained why its PlexoZome liposomes are true liposomes—and why others on the market might not be.

Is your liposome ingredient really a liposome? Pharmako Biotechnologies advises testing to be sure. Natural Products Expo West report

Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear has signed 

 into law to regulate the sale of delta-8 THC products. The bill implements part of Beshear’s Novemeber 2022 

 establishing a regulatory structure for the safe sale and purchase of delta-8 THC.

“This regulatory structure to ensure that Delta 8 is sold and purchased safely in the commonwealth can and will also serve as a template for when the General Assembly fully legalizes medical cannabis,” said Beshear in a statement. “We want Kentuckians to have access to the resources they need for relief. We want to make sure they can do that safely, and this bill is a good first step.”

“House Bill 544 makes it illegal for anybody under the age of 21 to purchase Delta 8. It’s going to require it to be behind the counter or in a secure cabinet, and it’s going to require labeling and batch testing to look for those dangerous residuals that can be left behind,” said Representative Rebecca Raymer, one of the bill’s sponsors. “I want to thank the great leadership team that was supportive of this bill and my colleagues in the House and Senate for voting unanimously for it, and I thank Governor Beshear for signing this important piece of legislation today.”

Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear has signed House Bill 544 into law to regulate the sale of delta-8 THC products.

Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear signs bill to regulate sale of delta-8 THC

Archer Daniels Midland (ADM; Red Wing, MN) formally launched its Knwble Grwn flaxseed and flax oil retail product brand during March’s Natural Products Expo West trade show in Anaheim, CA. ADM has processed flax at its Red Wing, MN, facility since 1902, but it was only this year that the company began manufacturing for the food-grade segment. What’s striking about Knwble Grwn is that its flax is sourced exclusively from farmers who practice regenerative farming. During Expo West, Knwble Grwn and its farmer-partner explained how they are working together to grow this partnership.

When asked why ADM decided to launch Knwble Grwn, Guy Christensen, brand ambassador for Knwble Grwn, said, “Any sustainable initiative is worth going after, to begin with. Knwble Grwn is soil health–based. We start with producers who are continuously implementing principles of soil health, the ones who are passionate about it. We want production off of those farms. We want to give consumers an opportunity to purchase this off of regen. It’s not certified-regen, but they’re practicing all of the soil-health principles.”

Knwble Grwn is currently sold in ecommerce. As of now, ADM is working with only two regenerative-agriculture flax farmers. One of those farms is Lee Farms in North Dakota, which is run by Paul Overby and his wife Diane. At Expo West, Overby explained the soil-health practices he’s implemented on his farm. “We’re doing a number of things on our farm, including no-till, and then we add a wide diversity of crops that we’re raising, because each of those has an impact on the soil and the microbiomes in the soil and makes the soil healthier. And then we’re including cover crops for further diversity.” In addition to flax, his farm is raising canola, field peas, oats, wheat, soybeans, and sunflowers.

Overby discussed the challenges and opportunities that growing regeneratively brings. From a dollars-and-cents standpoint, he said, regenerative farming actually saves money at the end of the day, “because as we’re building our soils, we’re cutting down our fertilizer inputs, we’re cutting down our chemical inputs. So, from that standpoint, it’s not more expensive.” Also, he said, there’s a lot of interest in including flax in rotation because it doesn’t need much fertilizer. “So we can reduce synthetic fertilizer, and it also sources phosphorous from the soil naturally. So we have a product that we don’t have to put phosphorous fertilizer; it brings it into the plant and then, as it decomposes, converts it into organic phosphorous, which helps the next crop.”

However, Overby continued, “From a management standpoint, [regenerative farming] takes more time.” You have to do a lot more forward-planning, he said. “As I was planning this year’s crops, I’m actually planning 2024’s crops. So I’ve got to be thinking ahead. It’s like playing a game of chess, compared to checkers.”

Only a small percentage of farmers are growing regeneratively today, Overby said. “A lot of farming is—you want to keep it simple, and the stuff we’re talking about is a little more complex. It takes more management, so there has to be a reward for that; otherwise, they’re going to keep it simple. I’ve got neighbors who raise wheat and soybeans. That’s all they raise. They keep it simple.”

ADM is hoping that through Knwble Grwn, it can steer more farmers toward regenerative practices. As Jaime Goehner, brand ambassador, Knwble Grwn, said at Expo West, “We’re happy to incentivize early adopters of regenerative agriculture to keep it growing.”

Overby agreed that farmers need the financial push to move towards regenerative. He said that in North Dakota, where he is based, farmers are “in different stages” of putting sustainable practices into place. The partnership with ADM, which ensures he’ll have a buyer for his flax, makes investing in regenerative easier, Overby said.

“From a farmer’s perspective, one of the things I like is that guys want to get into this,” Overby said. “I’m kind of headed in that direction, but it’s nice to get a signal from the marketplace that says, ‘Hey, you’re doing the right thing.’ And for farmers in the future to do this, they’re going to need that. They’re going to need that signal from the market.”

Farmers like Overby see the value in regen. And, he added, “We’re a smaller farm in our neighborhood, and this is one way that I can make additional profit doing what I’m doing, even on a small farm, by being connected to companies like ADM that are taking our products to the market and paying us a little extra effort for doing a good job.”

And with Knwble Grwn, consumers now have access to regenerative flax products backed by traceability. As Goehner said, “We see conventional flax on the shelf. We see organic flaxseed on the shelves. But I think this really meets the niche of 

 flax. I don’t know that I’ve seen a lot of it that has the traceability and transparency aspect as Knwble Grwn.”

Christensen said the company hopes to expand efforts like these and that it has “the ability to scale and bring in other products.” He said, “We’re evaluating other crops that we can include along with the flax line that will find space in what the customers are looking for.”

He added: “We’re excited to be in this space, because there’s a lot of producers who want to be regenerative. They’re just in the process of figuring out how to actually get into it, so hopefully this provides additional stimulus to get more and more growers looking down these lines, because soil is life, and we’ve got to take care of it.”

At Expo West, the company and its farmer-partner explained how they’re working together to make regenerative farming a profitable business model.

ADM’s new flax retail product line is built on regenerative farming: Natural Products Expo West report

Nuritas (Ireland), a company using artificial intelligence to discover health-promoting peptides from plants, announced results of a new clinical trial on its new PeptiStrong ingredient, derived from fava bean and containing specific cell-signaling peptides, showing that the ingredient has broad benefits for muscle health and muscle aging.

An earlier study on PeptiStrong on 30 men, conducted by Maastricht University and published in 

compared the effects of supplementing with PeptiStrong versus supplementing with milk protein on muscle mass and strength. “Following immobilization, PeptiStrong performed similarly to milk with regards to muscle mass loss and recovery; however, it outperformed milk protein and significantly improved the rate of muscle protein synthesis during recovery,” a Nuritas press release explains.

The new, second study, a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial now published in 

 was conducted on 30 men. Subjects supplemented either with placebo or 2.4 g/day of PeptiStrong and underwent resistance training. After delayed onset muscle soreness (DOMS) set in, blood biomarker analysis was performed to determine any changes from baseline. PeptiStrong subjects showed significantly improved strength recovery compared to placebo as well as a reduction in muscle fatigue, leading researchers to conclude that PeptiStrong “significantly improves strength recovery and restoration, reduces fatigue, and positively modulates alterations in markers related to muscle homeostasis.”

The Nuritas press release describes how results from this second 

study add to the information gleaned from the earlier 

 study, “demonstrating that PeptiStrong is a unique, multifaceted solution whose action at the root cause of muscle health and muscle aging could benefit multiple industries and various profiles of consumers.” It added: “Those findings may position [PeptiStrong] as the most effective solution ever discovered for muscles.”

During March’s Natural Products Expo West trade show in Anaheim, CA, I interviewed Nuritas’s head of product development, Sudipta Veeramachaneni, about why the company is devoted to using AI to explore plant-based peptide ingredients specifically.

“The interesting thing about peptides is that they are bioactive signaling peptides,” she explained. “What that essentially means is that they have the ability to modulate different changes in the body by either upregulating or downregulating genes and signals in the cell. Now, there are other ingredients that can do that, including things like vitamins and certain botanical extracts, but the unique thing about peptides is, by virtue of being signaling molecules, they let you 

 precisely go after specific customer benefits and essentially target the health benefit that you’re looking for.”

To discover previously undiscovered peptides in plants, Nuritas is using its Magnifier platform. Veeramachaneni said Nuritas currently has more than 6 million peptides in its peptide database. The company is working to validate the benefits of some of these peptides. Thanks to AI, this can be done much more quickly and efficiently.

“The Magnifier platform essentially has the ability to look into the entire plant, every peptide in the plant, and then identify which peptide could possibly have a benefit on muscle health,” Veeramachaneni explained. “Once that process happens, it goes through a number of additional steps to further finesse and identify which peptides actually have that ability.” It does so using study data, whether 

 that’s fed back into the AI, which can then tell researchers which peptides look most promising, and for what health benefits, allowing scientists to narrow down which to pursue in future research.

Veeramachaneni said Nuritas will continue research to determine what populations PeptiStrong can benefit beyond sports nutrition alone. “If we look at the mechanism of action and how it impacts different genes and markers in the body, it could apply to multiple populations,” she said. For now, PeptiStrong gives consumers an effective, plant-based peptide for muscle health that is an alternative to dairy-based protein.

Weijzen, M.E.G.; Holwerda, A.M.; Jetten, G.H.J.; et al. 

Peptide Network Supplementation Does Not Differ from Milk Protein in Modulating Changes in Muscle Size During Short-Term Immobilization and Subsequent Remobilization, but Increases Muscle Protein Synthesis Rates During Remobilization in Healthy Young Men. 

Kerr, A.; Hart, L.; Davis, H.; et al. Improved Strength Recovery and Reduced Fatigue with Suppressed Plasma Myostatin Following Supplementation of a 

 Hydrolysate, in a Healthy Male Population.” 

This second study adds to data gleaned from a first study published in the Journal of Nutrition that showed PeptiStrong peptides outperformed milk proteins for muscle protein synthesis.

A new clinical trial on Nuritas’s PeptiStrong AI-discovered peptides shows broad benefits for muscle health and muscle aging: Natural Products Expo West report

Anderson Advanced Ingredients (Irvine, CA) announced that it has received a “letter of no objection” from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in response to its GRAS (generally recognized as safe) notification for a resistant dextrin made from tapioca. The ingredient, marketed as FiberSMART, is available as a conventional or organic certified powder or syrup, and according to the company is 20% as sweet as sugar, and while having a low glycemic index, functions more like a sugar than a fiber. Highly tolerable to up to 70 grams per day, it could make an ideal sugar reduction solution, the company says.

“Please note that conventional dietary fiber ingredients often have a gritty mouthfeel,” said Susan Cho, PhD, president of AceOne RS, and world-renowned fiber expert, in a press release. “However, FiberSMART tapioca is soluble in water and contributes to a smooth mouthfeel without sacrificing the taste and flavor when used in food products.”

The GRAS status confirms that FiberSMART is safe for use at levels ranging from 1.2 to 10 grams per serving in a wide range of food applications, including: baked goods, non-alcoholic beverages, cereals, granola bars, condiments, dressings, confections, dairy products, frozen desserts, gravies and sauces, meal replacements, pasta and grain products, prepared meals, soups, processed fruits, shelf-stable desserts, snacks, crackers, and nutrition bars.

“We have received so much positive feedback about FiberSMART, not only for its versatility and tolerability, but also because its tight tolerances around water activity improve on product consistency and production run times,” said John Jarmul, vice president of marketing for Anderson Advanced Ingredients, in a press release. “FiberSMART is fully soluble and can also be used as a carrier in place of maltodextrin. Overall, it’s a great product for lowering sugar content and increasing fiber without sacrificing taste or texture.”

Anderson Advanced Ingredients announced that it has received a “letter of no objection” from FDA in response to its GRAS (generally recognized as safe) notification for a resistant dextrin made from tapioca. 

Anderson Advanced Ingredients announces no-objection GRAS letter for FiberSMART ingredient

Gelita (Eberbach, Germany) has launched a fast-setting gelatin, enabling a breakthrough in fortified gummy production by allowing for the starch-free production of gummies with a sensorial profile previously only available with a starch-based manufacturing process. The gelatin, branded Confixx, allows gummy manufacturers to work with different active ingredients while also simplifying the production process and creating cost savings, without compromising on texture.

Other efficiency gains include eliminating the starch preparation and gummy drying steps, which reduces the production time from two days to a few hours, as well as reducing the overall footprint of the process. Confixx also enables GMP-compliant production of fortified gummies, ruling out the risk of cross-contamination through the separation of batches with different active ingredients. A simpler process is ideal for small batch production, offering greater flexibility for product changes, and tighter control over ingredient dosing for greater freedom to innovate.

“The market for functional and fortified fruit gummies offers exciting growth prospects. Until now, product developers in this space have had their creativity curbed by practical manufacturing limitations,” said Johanna Schmidgall, PhD, global head of application development at Gelita, in a press release. “With the introduction of Confixx it is possible to produce gelatin-based gummies with virtually any active ingredient – from collagen peptides to melatonin, vitamins, and minerals. We can’t wait to see what new innovations this development will inspire.”

The gelatin, branded Confixx, allows gummy manufacturers to work with different active ingredients while also simplifying the production process and creating cost savings, without compromising on texture.

Gelita launches fast-setting gelatin for starch-free gummy manufacturing

NOW (Bloomingdale, IL) continues its industry self-policing program ­– in which the company tests unfamiliar brands sold on Amazon – with the testing of bromelain products. Bromelain is a proteolytic enzyme found in pineapple that supports digestive and joint health. Its activity is commonly measured in Gelatin Digesting Units, which measures bromelain’s ability to break down a gelatin solution. The GDU activity was determine using the U.S. Pharmacopeia method for bromelain, and the tests were conducted by an independent laboratory that specializes in enzyme testing: Venture Labs, in Lexington, KY.

Results of NOW's testing, provided by NOW. 

“We chose bromelain because raw material costs increased in recent years and we guessed that some suppliers or brands may knowingly, or unknowingly, be selling low potency products,” said Dan Richard, NOW’s vice president of global sales and marketing, in a press release. Richard has been spearheading this Amazon testing program since its beginning in 2017. “Bromelain is a fairly expensive enzyme and testing is more difficult than other basic vitamins and minerals. We assumed that most lower-priced, lessor-known brands do not test for Bromelain potency at all, and the results below seem to confirm this educated guess.”

NOW purchased 19 bromelain supplements on Amazon for testing, and also had its own capsule product tested, to verify label claims and potencies. Results showed that 15 out of 20 of the products tested failed to meet label claims for potency, with only six out of the 20 samples containing over 50% of the labeled potency. Twelve of the products even contained less than 10% of label claims. Only four of the products exceeded 100% of their labeled potency, with Now’s product being one of them, at 121%.

“NOW has been testing products sold by lesser-known brands for six years and consistently finds most suspect products failing potency testing,” Richard explained. “We have been testing products exclusively found on Amazon, but will begin adding unknown brands found on Walmart.com in the future. We are finding that low potency products often spend the most dollars marketing on both Amazon and Walmart.com.”

Now continues its industry self-policing program  with the testing of bromelain products sold on Amazon by unfamiliar brands.

Featured Content

Is a decline in immune health supplement sales inevitable?

What makes Asia-Pacific one of the leading markets for micronutrients?